Books: Echoing Ring

It was Ring Lardner who made the first serious attempt in fiction to
find out if baseball players are people. His answer in the You Know Me,
Al stories could be boiled down to yes, with reservations. Now, 40
years later, both sportswriters and novelists seem to have fewer
reservations. In Bernard Malamud's The Natural (TIME, Sept. 8, 1952),
there was the mystical intimation that major-leaguers might even have
souls. In Bang the Drum Slowly, Novelist Mark (The Southpaw) Harris
modestly stays closer to the bag....